Accessibility options urgently in need of update

[Astronema]

I have ms and don't have the dexterity to do any of this new stuff I would just drag the teams down. I've given up on ever finishing any of it.

[Vesplume]

Adding my support to this thread as someone who has been pretty active in the Eye Strain thread since DT started. Accessibility is the worst it's ever been and many people have been trying to point that out for months now to no avail. I don't have colorblindness so I can't speak to those issues, but this is something a major developer publishing one of the biggest MMOs should be aware of. There should be more options available to deal with these issues.

These visual elements are a way for the devs to flex the capabilities of the updated graphics engine, which is why it's a recurring problem in DT content (even though examples date as far back as SHB). Looking pretty doesn't mean much if it's indecipherable to people trying to play the content, and it means even less when it's causing harm to players just trying to play the game. It's a design philosophy they need to reassess.

[iiOmarSP]

I am personally unaffected by this, and can handle this sort of thing, but I can assure you that sometimes I would rather just lower the brightness on my TV because some of the content introduced in this patch is just a little too much for me

I agree with what kryptosona said, and I'd 100% vouch for a complete for a complete overhaul of this system because what we have is...not good.

[Ziri_O]

Honestly, I might not be colorblind but I am extremely photosensitive and as much as I adore the spectacle and the special effects I get so tired of being bedridden by a migraine just because I wanted to do my raids.

I love disco, I adore the design of the new raids, but I've had to keep battle effects almost entirely off and pray I don't miss an important battle cue since Shadowbringers just because I don't want to feel like I'm dying afterwards. The Nier and Omphalos raids were wonderful but I still have to lie down for at least an hour if I get them in roulettes!

It's the year of Our Lady Hydaelyn 2025 we shouldn't have to beg and plead for accessibility options in our games just so we don't want to die within the first twenty minutes of prog. I have to spend the entire fights watching the arena from my peripheral vision while staring directly at my hotbars so I don't end up with my headache kicking in instantly from the bright flashing, quick color swaps, and the overall eyestrain. We need better than just "something is better than nothing" at this point, it's limiting people's ability to interact with the kind of content they love.

Do the devteam know how hard it was doing the latest trial with the purple aoes on the red carpet? Having to figure out if it was the colored dancefloor tiles or an aoe about to kill us? I want someone in QA with sensitivity problems to vouch for us with visual processing problems. I can't do savage raids or mount farm like this.

[Soren1234]

its... not just an issue for colorblind individuals either. I have 3 friends in my static who get really bad health complications from the super flashy stuff (blue flashes, yellowy orange flashes, and colorful flashes in general.)

Yoshi p... please give us thhe option to both change aoe colors and turn off boss effects. That would solve so many issues

[wyrmbr4nd]

My fiance is colorblind and physically could not do Phoinix, and is now having the same problems again with Recollection. Not even EX, NORMAL MODE. Orange on Orange on Red/pink with barely and discernible difference between the red and the pink is artificial difficulty and a huge accessibility gap. I myself have been so overwhelmed with some visuals that I get migraines more frequently after I started raiding. Fulgent blade is incredibly visually bad with the flashes and strikes going into other things, and stuff like Eulogia is so so horrendously bad to see what's going on as well.

[Gwenkatsu]

its... not just an issue for colorblind individuals either. I have 3 friends in my static who get really bad health complications from the super flashy stuff (blue flashes, yellowy orange flashes, and colorful flashes in general.)

This. There were always some flashy whiteouts in the fights, but to me if feels like it's getting more and more. To the point where I have to repeatedly close my eyes for 5 seconds during trials and raids - guess how good that works out...

[contresixtes]

Hi, I don't normally reply to threads, but I felt the need to make a post. I am disabled, I have chronic migraines that are triggered by photosensitivity and also am autistic and prone to sensory overload. I also have friends who are either red/green or blue/purple colorblind. This is not JUST a DT problem. This is a problem that has been increasing over time since SHB, however, the last time they were receptive to feedback was in SHB-- Mt. Gulg and Paradigm's Breach were both later adjusted. ENW and DT have so far received no such fixes.

The floor pattern in Recollection, whether normal or EX, is very difficult to see. The red and the brown are both desaturated making them very similar in value. For those who forget the definition, value is the lightness or darkness of a color-- how close it is to white or black. Since the brown and red are similar values, if you were to grayscale an image of Recollection's arena floor, they would be nearly if not the same color of gray. This is a problem for people who are colorblind, and anecdotally I've seen people who are not colorblind have trouble reading the arena too.

This is not the only fight this occurs in. For Wicked Thunder Savage, during the Ion Cluster mechanic (the cannon) four debuffs go out: dark blue, dark purple, light blue, and light green. The dark blue and dark purple are also almost identical in value, as are the light blue and light green. People who cannot see a combination of those colors have a difficult time reading these debuffs. Recollection and Wicked Thunder are just two examples, a lot of people have cited Phoinix here as an issue- and that fight gave me a migraine every time I raided.

I really feel like that SE is utilizing these difficult color combos to make the fights arbitrarily harder. They should not be doing this, not when there is hardly anything for colorblind/photosensitive people outside of third party tools, which are disallowed. One proof of these lights being utilized to make a mechanic more difficult is P12S, in the first phase-- I remember reading on Twitter that it was found when disabling the flashing white and purple galaxy lights to spare photosensitive people caused you to be able to read the mechanic (Superchain Theory I) a whole five seconds earlier. Why hide a mechanic behind flashing lights? Do mechanics really take that long to load in? Could NOTHING ELSE be put there as filler?

I had to skip out on DT EX3 entirely because of the amount of eyestrain. It gave me a three day migraine when I cleared it for DT and then again when I tried to clear its extreme version. SE, in the off chance you'll ever read this: PLEASE FIX THIS! People who WANT to be here can't! I like the story and raid series, and I am so excited for Shades' Triangle. But if something is not done about the VFX, debuff color values, and the arenas, I don't know how much longer I can keep raiding.

'Cause my migraine meds are EXPENSIVE.

[Rainfallen]

I had to skip out on DT EX3 entirely because of the amount of eyestrain. It gave me a three day migraine when I cleared it for DT and then again when I tried to clear its extreme version. SE, in the off chance you'll ever read this: PLEASE FIX THIS! People who WANT to be here can't! I like the story and raid series, and I am so excited for Shades' Triangle. But if something is not done about the VFX, debuff color values, and the arenas, I don't know how much longer I can keep raiding.

'Cause my migraine meds are EXPENSIVE.

I ALMOST had to skip on EX3 myself after how badly nauseous the normal made me going through story! It subsided, somehow, and I won't question that; but that fight gave me such a nasty headache that i was nauseous and had an especially bad migraine the next day. Chronic migraine havers rise up, carefully cuz we might get sick....

The only saving grace for me in EX3 was that Aethertithe only happened ONCE unlike in normal mode and the ice phase eased my nausea enough to do the final phase to clear it.

[GumshoeJump]

The visual clarity (or lack there of) in a lot of recent fights is just completely unacceptable. The sheer frequency in which I have been met with mechanics I cannot read for one reason or another is starting to become frankly miserable. M3S became impossible because the colours were all the same barely different shades of orange; made the visual tells impossible to glance read. M7N's visual tells are either rendered nearly impossible to read because of the boss' design and size, or downright insufficient to respond to (nice proximity you didn't give an indicator to, Square-- remember when you put a proximity indicator in the Copied Factory for that same mech? That was cool, I liked it, you should do it again).

I died repeatedly in Recollection because I had no ability to perceive the presence of the bleed puddle during roseblood bloom due to the fact the brown and red were nearly identical. The puddle may as well have been invisible to me; and I have rather good colour vision actually! It doesn't help that the puddle was additionally obfuscated by overwrought VFX for moves that take up the same amount of visual real estate as a common raidwide. I know I can disable party VFX, I just don't think the player vfx should be so excessive I am forced to disable it in order to play the game!

I cannot fathom how truly unplayable it must be for people who already need accessibility options this game only pretends to have. I desperately hope the team both reconsiders its current visual design habits for combat content, and gives us a way to override and modify visual indicators with our own choices in colour and mayhaps patterning!